Read Online Foundation Fear by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online

it's from pre-Empire, about
     a Zone with pretensions of grandeur. 'All worms lead to Roma' is another one.”
    “Never heard of this Roma.”
    “Me either, but pomposity springs forth eternal. It looks comic in retrospect.”
    Yugo moved restlessly around Hari's office. “So they don't care?”
    “To them it's just backdrop for their power games.”
    Already the Empire had worlds, Zones, and even whole arcs of spiral arms descended into
     squalor. Still worse, in a way, was a steady slide into garish amusements, even vulgarity.
     The media swarmed with the stuff. The new “renaissance” styles from worlds like Sark were
     popular.
    To Hari the best of the Empire was its strands of restraint, of subtlety and discretion in
     manners, finesse and charm, intelligence, talent, and even glamour. Helicon had been crude
     and rural, but it knew the difference between silk and swine.
    “What do the policy types say?” Yugo sat halfway on Hari's desk, avoiding the control
     functions implanted beneath a woody veneer. He had come in with the kaff as a pretext,
     fishing for gossip about the exalted. Hari smiled to himself; people relished some aspects
     of hierarchy, however much they griped about it.
    “They're hoping some of the 'moral rebirth' movements -- like revised Ruellianism, say --
     will take hold. Put spine into the Zones, one of them said.”
    “Ummm. Think it'll work?”
    “Not for long.”
    Ideology was an uncertain cement. Even religion fervor could not glue an empire together
     for long. Either force could drive formation of an empire, but they could not hold against
     greater, steady rides -- principally, economics.
    “How about the war in the Orion Zone?”
    “Nobody mentioned it.”
    “Think we've got war figured right in the equations?” Yugo had a knack for suddenly
     putting his finger on what was bothering Hari.
    “No. War was an overesteemed element in history.”
    Certainly war often gained center stage; no one continued to read a beautiful poem when a
     fist fight broke out nearby. But fist fights did not last, either. Further, they joggled
     the elbows of those trying to make a living. To engineers and traders alike, war did not
     pay. So why did wars break out now, with all the economic weight of the Empire against
     them?
    “Wars are simple. But we're missing something basic -- I can feel it.”
    “We've based the matrices on all that historical data Dors dug out,” Yugo said a bit
     defensively. “That's solid.”
    “I don't doubt it. Still ... ”
    “Look, we've got over twelve thousand years of hard facts. I built the model on that.”
    “I have a feeling what we're missing isn't subtle.”
    Most collapses were not from abstruse causes. In the early days of Empire consolidation,
     local minor sovereignties flourished, then died. There were recurrent themes in their
     histories.
    Again and again, star-spanning realms collapsed under the weight of excessive taxation.
     Sometimes the taxes supported mercenary armies which defended against neighbors, or which
     simply kept domestic order against centrifugal forces. Whatever the ostensible cause of
     taxes, soon enough the great cities became depopulated, as people fled the tax collectors,
     seeking “rural peace.”
    But why did they do that spontaneously?
    “People.” Hari sat up suddenly. “That's what we're missing.”
    “Huh? You proved yourself -- remember? the Reductionist Theorem? -- that individuals don't
     matter.”
    “They don't. But people do. Our coupled equations describe them in the mass, but we don't
     know the critical drivers.”
    “That's all hidden, down in the data.”
    “Maybe not. What if we were big spiders, instead of primates? Would psychohistory look the
     same?”
    Yugo frowned. “Well ... if the data were the same ... ”
    “Data on trade, wars, population statistics? It wouldn't matter whether we were counting
     spiders instead of people?”
    Yugo shook his head, his